Tony Blackburn: 'I don’t think I’ve heard anything like the hysteria at Beatles’ concerts'

Not only that, but the programme – produced by BBC Radio Leeds to coincide with Bradford 2025’s City of Culture celebrations – also explores McCartney’s relationship with the city’s world-renowned Black Dyke Band.

“I must admit it surprised me that (Beatlemania) started in 1963 at The Gaumont on a tour with Kenny Lynch, Danny Williams and Helen Shapiro,” says the now 82-year-old DJ in a video call with The Yorkshire Post. “I didn’t know they had connections with Bradford. I didn’t know Paul McCartney had connections with the Black Dyke Band either. It seems very bizarre.”

Blackburn, who was starting out as a singer at the same time as Beatlemania kicked off before he moved into broadcasting on pirate radio stations and later, BBC Radio 1, notes that it had been a primetime TV appearance that had started the clamour for the band, sending their second single, Please Please Me, scampering up the charts.

“It really took off for (The Beatles) when they did Thank Your Lucky Stars, which was a very big pop show at the time – I used to watch that as a kid – and that was the one all the big names went on, so that was their big break,” he says. Suddenly, their shows at The Gaumont a few days later were the hottest ticket in town, with the venue’s 3,282 seats sold out within three hours of going on sale – despite The Beatles being bottom of the bill.

“Everybody’s got to start somewhere,” Blackburn says. “After that, they obviously headlined their own tours. Certainly when I saw them in Bournemouth in ’64 they were the only act on. But you couldn’t hear them because everybody was screaming their heads off. You could see them on the stage and they were performing but you couldn’t really hear what they were doing.

“There’s still the hysteria for people like Taylor Swift, the young girls scream at her, but I don’t think I’ve heard anything like The Beatles’ concerts. They were sex symbols and the kids were going along and they loved them, when Paul McCartney waved his hair around they would scream their heads off.

“But they were there just to see The Beatles, it was a major event. I think they could’ve just stood there and waved their guitars around, they were so massive, and in those days you either liked The Rolling Stones or The Beatles. The Beatles were more acceptable to the mums and dads, they were more clean cut; The Rolling Stones were a little bit off the edge for them, I think. I had a Beatles jacket I used to wear, we all wore them.”

The documentary recalls the band being grateful for tea and sandwiches backstage. Blackburn remembers Paul McCartney being”really nice” when he interviewed him in the mid-Sixties. “They’re human beings like everybody else,” he says. “But it was the image that was being created for them. Brian Epstein was a brilliant manager. I had Harold Davison, he was my manager and he looked after Frank Sinatra in this country and people like that. To have a Brian Epstein or a Harold Davison behind you was so important because they put you with the right people, and The Beatles were built up by Brian Epstein, but they had that special quality as well. They just gave us so many fabulous songs, they were so talented.”

The memories of those who were there at the time speak of a world far removed from social media and Spotify. “The 60s is so important,” says Blackburn, arguing that for many, it remains so. Of 29 dates on his current Sounds of the 60s live tour, which takes his regular BBC Radio 2 show out of the studio and into theatres, most dates are sold out. “We’ve got an audience of 45 and over and we do the shows Monday to Thursday – I have to be back on Friday to do Radio 2, and the older audience don’t want to go out on Saturdays with the kids. The show started six years ago with 600 to 800-seaters but now we’re in 2,500-seaters,” he says.

On the BBC Sounds app, Sounds of the 60s is, Blackburn says, “their top-rated show out of all music programmes”.

“A lot of kids now have cottoned on to the 60s because they’ve found they can hear the lyrics. They were not overproduced like things today,” he adds.

The second part of the documentary focuses on McCartney’s work with the Black Dyke Band on the theme tune for the theme to the London Weekend Television sitcom Thingumybob, which starred Stanley Holloway. The instrumental track was recorded in Saltaire on June 30, 1968. “I thought it was amazing, I didn’t know that he knew anything about brass bands,” says Blackburn. “But he does have a love of all types of music. I’d never heard of Thingumybob until I did the documentary, but it’s interesting. I think people will learn a lot about The Beatles from the documentary that they didn’t know about – particularly Paul McCartney.”

On the day of recording, McCartney had been unhappy with the echo in Victoria Hall so he took the band outside to record. There they were watched by an appreciative audience of around 200 people. Blackburn was struck by how low-key it all wa, despite the presence of a Beatle in their midst. “With social media now, the whole world has changed since the Sixties,” he says. “In our studios at BBC Radio 2 we’ve got four or five cameras, you just blink and it’s all recorded, so nowdays it would be totally different. But that’s what’s lovely about the 60s, it was so basic.

“I think the technology we have now is amazing. It amazes me that the world isn’t happier because we have everything – that’s probably the problem, we’ve got so much now. But back then it was a simpler time. That’s what’s so lovely about the Sixties – The Beatles and the Rolling Stones and Gerry and the Pacemakers, the stuff that I play on Sounds of the 60s.”

Black Dyke Band went on have a record deal with The Beatles’ label, Apple, releasing four singles. In 1979 McCartney worked with them again on the track Winter Rose/Love Awake for the Wings album Back to the Egg.

Of his own ambitions to be a pop star, Blackburn recalls: “I was at college in Bournemouth studying for a diploma in business studies, which I got, and I was the guitarist and singer with a dance band, it was a 15-piece orchestra. They’d play foxtrots and quicksteps and things like that, then I used to come out with a breakout band and I used to do all the pop stuff.

“I used to sing Cliff Richard and Elvis Presley and all of that sort of thing. It was a very good training for later on because now I’m doing a Sounds of the Sixties theatre show all over the country, so I’m back to what I used to do. For me, it’s fantastic because I love working with musicians. We have a seven-piece band with a couple of singers and we’re all over the country doing a tour.

“I always wanted to be a singer, really – well, I did actually make 29 singles and two albums. None of them sold very well, but that was my aim.”

He became a disc jockey after reading an advert in the New Musical Express. “I thought by becoming a disc jockey I’d get closer to the record business, which actually happened,” he says. “I had more success as a DJ (than as a singer), and I’m glad I did.”

His first steps on the air were with Radio Caroline and Radio London, before he joined the BBC, becoming on September 30, 1967 the first voice to be heard on Radio 1. “When we came along with Radio 1 it was a monopoly until commercial radio came along, so you could build your name up with a week or two weeks because we had an audience of 21 million,” he says. “But now, there’s so many radio stations, somebody coming along as good as they are, it’s very difficult to build a name for yourself.”

The same, he believes, applies to television as well. “Who watches live television so much now? You’ve got Netflix, Disney, the lot, so it’s a different ball game the media. And probably The Beatles would find it slightly difficult to make a name for themselves so quickly. That one thing with Thank Your Lucky Stars really launched them, we were all watching it. With Top of the Pops, for instance, it had an audience of 17 or 18 million people. You don’t get that any more.”

Radio had appealed to Blackburn from an early age. “When I was a youngster, I used to listen to an enormous amount of radio,” he says. “We had the BBC Light Programme and things like that, but I’ve always loved music right from five or six years old, and I always wanted to be in music in some way. I just thought radio in particular because it’s such an intimate medium. Unlike television, where a lot of it is recorded and you don’t have that immediate reaction. Last night I was doing a thing that I do on Sundays called The Golden Hour and you get an immediate reaction for the audience.

“Also, I often have the radio on in the car and just hearing somebody talking to me at that time and it’s live and you can reflect what’s happening, that’s the joy and the magic of radio to me. Particularly Radio 2, where I’m working now – opening up Radio 1 was lovely and being on pirate radio​​​​​​​ but being on the top radio station now at my age​​​​​​​ – the number one station in Europe, actually – and doing this theatre show as well is a dream come true. I’m so lucky, I don’t know how it happened.”

He says he is “very flattered” when he meets listeners. “A lot of people come up to me now and say, ‘You’ve been with us all our lives, we’ve grown up together, you played me a record when I was going to school’. It’s 61 years now and I wouldn’t be doing it unless I really loved it. I get out of going into the studio and still get a buzz that I love. To me, it’s the most natural thing in the world.

“When I was on Radio Caroline and went into the studio for the first time I’d never broadcast in my life before and I just absolutely adored it from the first programme. I’m very lucky I don’t suffer from nerves. When I go onstage, to me it’s the most natural thing in the world to joke around with the audience. And Radio 2 is lovely, working with so many well-known people – Dermot O’Leary, Vernon Kay and people like that, they’ve all made it, we’re all friends together. I’m not after Dermot’s job, he’s not after mine… It’s a lovely station to be a part of.”

For more than 50 years, Blackburn has been renowned as a great advocate for soul music. He remembers that he did the first soul programme on radio in the UK when he was working for Radio London in the mid-1960s. “When I went to the BBC and opened up Radio 1 I was lucky because I could choose a lot of the music we did on the Breakfast Show, we didn’t have a playlist, so I made sure I played a lot of Motown and Jackie Wilson. In the early days I loved Sam Cooke and Jackie Wilson and The Drifters...and when I got to know them as well they were really nice and that made it even better,” he says.

In 1978 Blackburn even scored a Northern Soul dance floor hit of his own with a version of his favourite Doris Troy numbers, I’ll Do Anything, that was released under the pseudonym Lenny Gamble. “I was recording an album and I wanted another track to go on it and somebody suggested doing that and I said I can’t sing soul music, but I did this thing and it was the most unsoulful song I’d ever heard in my life,” he says. “It was a shame, I’d ruined it, but the guys at the Wigan Casino put it on a white label under the name of Lenny Gamble and it became a Northern Soul hit and it’s on the Casino Classics label now.

“I went up and did a personal appearance at Wigan Casino and they introduced me on the stage as Lenny Gamble and I saw the look of disappointment in people’s faces, they thought, ‘My God, we’ve bought a Tony Blackburn record’. But it did really well, I couldn’t understand why, to be honest, because the Doris Troy record is so much better, but there you go.”

In 2002, Blackburn became King of the Jungle after winning the first series of ITV’s I’m a Celebrity… Get Me Out of Here. He admits it had a transformative effect on his career, but says that when he was first asked to be a contestant he was incredulous. “My agent Nick Cannon said, ‘How would you like to be dropped into the jungle in Australia and survive for a fortnight?’ I thought he was joking but he rang me up about two weeks later and said, ‘ITV want to see you’,” he recalls. “They said, ‘Do you like outdoor life?’ I said I like the sea but I don’t go camping or anything like that, I’d rather go into a hotel. Then they said, ‘How would you survive in the jungle?’ and I said, I’m a vegetarian, I’ve never really thought about it, I couldn’t eat meat or anythin​​​​​​​g...But it sounded interesting. I presumed in the evening we’d go back to a hotel.

“They came back about three weeks later saying they wanted me to do it​​​​​​​ and my wife and my mother tried to talk me out of doing it saying they didn’t think I’d be very good at that. But I was 60 at the time and I said I’ve been given the opportunity and I think sometimes these things come along once in a lifetime and I would hate it if I watched this programme that ITV had told me was ​​​​​​​going to be the biggest show they’d ever done and thought I could be doing that​​​​​​​. I went out there and I really loved it​​​​​​​.

“It was tough, I don’t think they’d told us we were going to have to do these trials. Tara Palmer-Tomkinson did the first trial and she came back and said to us, ‘I think something went wrong’. We said what’s that? and she said, ‘They tipped a load of stuff all over me​​​​​​​’ We said that must have been a mistake, we thought we were just going to sit around a campfire for a fortnight, I don’t remember them telling us we were going to do that.​​​​​​​”

He says the jungle experience “changed” him as a person. “There were no mobile phones there and the rainforest was just so beautiful, the sound of the birds and all the rest of it, and the peace of it. It was a tough show to do but I really enjoyed it, it made me much more appreciate what I had. I think it’s made me a lot nicer and better with people. I’m not in the slightest bit religious but I had this inner peace. I remember when I came out, we didn’t know how the show had done, but I was filling my car up at Brent Cross and this very old guy with sticks came over and patted me on the back and said, ‘You have done our age group so much good’ and it made me really quite emotional, I thought how nice, I loved it.”

Tony Blackburn presents Bradford, Brass and The Beatles – available now on BBC Sounds – and broadcast as part of the Radio 2 Loves Brass Concert (recorded at St George's Hall, Bradford) on BBC Radio 2 on Sunday April 20, 8-10pm.

Sounds of the 60s with Tony Blackburn tour visits Leeds Grand Theatre on June 30. https://www.ticketmaster.co.uk/tony-blackburn-tickets/artist/743396